Wounded
by TheRegnant
Summary: "The wounded recognize the wounded." Or, five times the golden twins were lost.


They were four. Just moments ago, they had been laughing and romping about on the sand, under the stars. They had been much too excited to meet their new sibling for something as silent as sleep. _Mother had even promised me a brother._

Sneaking back inside to Cersei's bed to wait, he'd caught a glimpse of red. The septa had been holding a mountain of crimson cloth in her hands. His twin's eyes had followed his, and an expression of worry had scorned her face. Cersei had shaken her head, grasping his hand and pulling, following the sister to see where she was going. "Come on," she had whispered, "let's hurry."

They'd crept about the corner, following her with strides as silent as four-year-olds could manage, into a room that was rarely used. She sat the mound of red cloth down amongst much more like it and exited the room. Moving in closer, the confusion had set in as he'd realized that the sheets used to be white.

He'd felt the older twin tentatively holding her breath next to him, and they had swiftly set off to find Mother, slinking up the grand spiral staircase of the Rock to the birthing room to see that she was alright.

Instead, they had found Father, who was certainly not alright, clasping Mother's hand. Jaime remembered noticing that it wasn't clasping back like always and frowning. " _Joanna..."_ But just as her hand would not twine with his, her lips would not smile up at him nor part to answer, and her eyes would not open, not ever again.

He vaguely remembered collapsing into his sister, but more so the feeling of her tiny leonine muscles stretching taut to hold him up. He knew that she didn't quite understand what it meant for Mother to be still like that, not at first glance, but there was a marred moment between the hope leaving her eyes and the hatred setting in: before her gaze had shifted from their dead Mother to a newborn Tyrion.

The wounds were grievous, leaving a reflection of the ruined linens to seemingly tint the viridian there until the end of days.

 _I'd recognize it anywhere._

Though Cersei's eyes, and certainly her demeanor, had never been quite the same, it had been more than thirty-five years until the wounds had truly reopened, seeping blood into his favorite set of gems. Moments ago, their son had been taunting his uncle— _his other uncle_ —at his own wedding, making a Lord into a cupbearer, commanding him to kneel. It had been a rather horrid jape from a rather horrid King, if one sought to be honest.

Yet Joffrey had fallen from his grandeur as the breath was ripped from his treacherous throat, the ground from his leather-clad feet. Jaime and Cersei were both sprinting to their eldest boy's side—the Queen Regent and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard doing anything they could to save the King, as far as the populace was concerned, anyway.

No matter how far from their former glory they had fallen, the fates served to push them back together again and again, if cruelly. Jaime had watched any semblance of mercy left in his sister's eyes die, the rattle of its last breath serving only to fan the fires of her fury. The red vision manifested again as she noticed who Joff was pointing at with the last of his strength. Jaime had hoped against hope that he would never see it again, but here it was. _One glimpse, and I am four again._

" _Take him!"_

Perhaps their brother hadn't been murderous up to that point: Jaime had believed him innocent for true. Even when he'd announced at court that he wished he had killed his nephew, his son, naming him " _vicious bastard"_ for all to hear, Jaime had never doubted the dwarf. Maybe it was reflective, remorseful: Joffrey was the firstborn son that Jaime had never quite loved, or even exactly liked. He was surely awful to most everyone, but Tyrion was still silly to say so.

Silly, not murderous. _Until he was._

The scorn in Cersei's eyes had been different the third time. It was evolving; _Surely a thing has to exist to evolve._ Jaime reviled that idea. She was angry, and he was sure that the rufescent ruthlessness still held great root in her gilded, glacial heart, but she looked truly at the end of her rope. On what she was giving up, he hadn't been quite sure, family, him, herself, everything? Either way, her anger had nowhere to go with an absent Imp and and a dead patriarch, no cheek to absorb her blows nor a Hand to deliver them. _Just like me._ Cersei was lost, as was her power; nothing angered the Queen like impotence.

She was vermillion and vicious, red and raw with rage…

And _right._

It was too late to acknowledge it, however. Jaime had lost his lord father, some precious unknown part of his sister, and now his brother. Just as soon as the pieces had seemed sealed back together on the table in the White Tower, red lips on his golden hand, they had exploded again in an angry green haze _like the Sept of Baelor._

He could see the festering fire reflected in the motive mirror that was his sister's face, and later, in the looking glass, once Lord Tywin was locked away lifeless in a crypt.

The feeling of the flames had followed him on his trip to Dorne. It was as hot as men said, and as full of sin as the Seven Hells, not that Jaime was unsullied of his own accord, of course. Even in victory, Jaime had been burned there like feet on baking sand, much like Cersei's own feet blistering and bleeding on the cobblestones of King's Landing at the same time back home. He himself was the first to rage this time; his sister was otherwise occupied half a world away, after all. He was never sure which wound scarred the hardest: the feeling of failure, or the salty scorn in Cersei's eyes upon his return.

More like, it was the chance he'd never actually expected to receive being ripped away as quickly as it had arrived. " _I know. About you and Mother._ " The smell of Myrcella's spun golden hair, the glow of her smile, the warmth of her skin on his good hand. _I got to be a father for all of ten seconds._ The violence that would infest the twins' eyes was tangible this time. The copper scent polluted the room as it mixed with the hard gold— _no_ , he reminded himself, _it is gilded steel, even if it is not fit for battle_ —holding up what was left of his only daughter. It seeped into the metal out of the button nose she had crinkled so sweetly when she was small, and when he'd pulled his other hand away, all of the heat escaping her body had seemed to rush into the skin all at once, scorching the flesh to the core. What was moments ago a pleasant warmth had burned him forever, the contusion ever angry, seeming to scar but never quite closing.

Now that it had held her as she had gone, he had no truly _good_ hand left.

Yet here that hand is, pressed against the cool wood of Cersei's chamber door. Jaime isn't sure exactly what he seeks coming here tonight. He catches himself wondering for a moment with whom he is hoping to have an audience. The woman who has crowned herself Queen Regnant tonight is not the same woman that he had crowned Queen of Love and Beauty all those years ago. Perhaps that is the point, though. He needs to see for himself, to see what he has come back to find, to see if he'd truly meant the words he'd said to Edmure Tully back in Riverrun, if there is a difference between loving a woman that would burn cities to the ground and loving a woman that has.

 _Answers_ , he decides. Answers will quell this fire, especially if they might fall from lips so much like his own.

Yet when he raps at the door, draws it open, her lips are silent.

It is a long moment before she turns to look at him. The strength she had shown in the Throne Room before seems to have melted away along with the explosion's heat. The only fire left in her eyes is the hearth's dancing reflection, the flames flickering as they blaze and battle against the bitter burn of winter chills.

The initial rage of losing their Little King has faded from her face, to be replaced by something entirely other. The pain she has been masking behind the anger is finally apparent, and he knows, _I know, I always know, just admit it, Cersei, you are a Queen, not a god, your tears will not flood the realm._

He wants to be angry, or at least skeptical. He wants to wring her at the hair and demand to know how much of this was her fault, directly and otherwise. _Or he wants to want to do it_ , like he did until he had seen her, but the wildfire of her eyes is only smolders of smoke now. The look is different this time than the last. There is no rabidity left to consume her; She is consuming it instead, and he knows that she must see it in him, too, that nothing is quite the same.

There is a certain air of searching in her eyes. Pleading, even. Her right hand abandons an encrusted goblet filled with liquid fury; it stretches out in front of her in favor of him instead.

" _Jaime."_

It would not be loving to make her beg, and she knows, she has always known, that he can't help himself when she says his name, _not that way. That hasn't changed._

He hardly notices his body crossing the room to wrap itself about hers. Four pools of cruor and absinthe are much too busy with each other.

They collapse together once again—thirty-eight years later, her into him this time—in the way that Mother had scolded them for so long ago, skin melding, blood rushing to cheeks, chests, _anywhere but the eyes, Seven Hells,_ until this is all there is because _this is all there ever has been,_ and they are together, even if their last boy, _the boy I wanted to love, the boy I wanted to save,_ is somewhere so far away now. And, _oh,_ he knows those eyes. They're so close that his vision blurs as their foreheads press together, but he doesn't need to use his own to see them, not anymore, because they are how they once were so long ago in that single moment before she was ever corrupted. She is hurt and horrified, but she still holds some semblance of faith in him, some hope of winning, that there is something here that the two might salvage and remedy. For a few moments, he isn't sure who is ensnared back in whose claws, and then he can feel the fierceness returning to her as they dissolve. There is a chorus of names spilling from lips accompanied by the repetitive percussion of skin joining skin, and then, shuddering as silent as the end of the world when the coils in their bellies finally unfurl. Everything is theirs now, even if there is nothing left to have, a triad of shrouds in exchange for a pair of crowns.

 _The wounded recognize the wounded._


End file.
